Angela Barrett: Joan of Arc

Written by Josephine Poole, this biography of Joan of Arc for young readers is both in and out of Angela Barrett’s wheelhouse. On the one hand, it’s not a fairy tale retelling like so many of her other projects. On the other, she’s illustrated plenty of stories set in medieval times, so it wasn’t a stretch for her to capture the stone castles and bright heraldry of 15th century France.

I’m not Catholic, but since I was a kid I’ve been fascinated with Joan of Arc and what she accomplished in her lifetime, and a lot of her recorded history seems to defy rational explanation: her ability to identify a king she’d never seen before, her accurate prophecies about how certain events would unfold, and the extraordinary horsemanship she demonstrated in the streets of Orleans, when the standard she was carrying caught fire.

It’s easy to assume that she had schizophrenia or some other undiagnosed mental illness, but at the same time, the fact she went from heretic to martyr within her mother’s lifetime is astonishing. Let’s just say most preadolescent girls (even the non-Catholic ones) have a Joan of Arc phase.

There are plenty of beautiful images throughout this book that capture Joan’s short and strange life, but I’ve always been taken by the one in which she’s only thirteen years old, hearing the Voices for the first time. It captures the warmth and serenity of a summer day, with greenery filling the page right to its edges. The beehive and the reclining cat speak of warm domesticity and peacefulness; the ladder of work that’s been temporarily abandoned.

Joan stands in the midst of it all, her face upraised, clearly listening to something.

It’s such a tranquil scene, and yet already holds clues as to Joan’s fate. She’s happy but alone, and there’s no visual representation of the Voices or their source, lending the scene an ambiguity not found anywhere else in the book (later on the angels are plainly depicted as real).

Can she see something in the trees that we cannot, or is she just bathing her face in the sunshine? Is this the moment she first hears the Voices from heaven? The dense layering of the greenery surrounds and protects her, creating a place of holy wonderment that exists in stark contrast to all the violence and pain that is to follow.

Joan’s face is tiny, and yet both peace and pleasure is rendered in her expression with just a few brushstrokes, reminding us that at its heart, this is simply the story of a young girl and her unseen faith. It’s the fulfilment of John Clare’s spiritual yearning:

I long for scenes where man hath never trod

A place where woman never smiled or wept

There to abide with my Creator, God,

And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,

Untroubling and untroubled where I lie

The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

I have no idea what Barrett’s religious affiliations are (or if she even has any) but she has depicted Joan in that very place: below the sky, above the grass, alone with her God.